The demands for natural gas have increased in recent years. The transport of natural gas is through pipelines or through the transportation on ships. Many areas where natural gas is located are remote in the sense that there are no convenient pipelines to readily transfer the natural gas to the market. Therefore natural gas is frequently transported by ship. The transport of natural gas on ships requires a means to reduce the volume and one method of reducing the volume is to liquefy the natural gas. The process of liquefaction requires cooling the gas to very low temperatures. There are several known methods of liquefying natural gas as can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,367,286; U.S. Pat. No. 6,564,578; U.S. Pat. No. 6,742,358; U.S. Pat. No. 6,763,680; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,886,362.
One of the methods is a cascade method using a number of shell and tube heat exchangers. Each of these shell and tube heat exchangers, is very large and very expensive, and presents problems of economics and feasibility for remote and smaller natural gas fields. It would be desirable to have a device for liquefying natural gas that is compact and relatively inexpensive to ship and use in remote locations, especially for natural gas fields found under the ocean floor, where collection and liquefaction of the natural gas can be performed on board a floating platform using a compact unit.
The most common commercial design of a heat exchanger for the cooling of natural gas is a spiral wound heat exchanger where the coolant cascades within a shell over spiral wound tubes carrying the gas to be cooled.
There is also an increasing demand for methods of cooling gases to condense them for transport or for separation purposes. Improvements over the current commercial design can include lower cost, lower weight, and provide a more compact structure as well as provide improved heat transfer characteristics.